The latest on California politics and government

January 22, 2010

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger did not issue a cryptic, expletive-laced veto message to Assemblyman Tom Ammiano last year after all, judging from a check of online legislative records.

The veto message that left the governor's office last October for Assembly Bill 1176 contained a profane acrostic message: The first letter of each line, read vertically, spelled out a two-word expletive starting with "F" and ending with "YOU."

Though it made national and international news at the time, the odd acrostic slap at Ammiano is nowhere to be found in the Legislature's own online tracking system for bills, www.leginfo.ca.gov

The words in Schwarzenegger's veto message system are the same, but each line is a little shorter than the original, wiping out the two-word acrostic expletive for anyone searching legislative records in decades to come.

Aaron McLear, Schwarzenegger's spokesman, said the governor did not request the change.

Legislative Counsel Diane Boyer-Vine, whose office maintains the online tracking system, said that such changes occur naturally because of differences in formatting between the Legislature's online system and the document sent from the governor's office.

In a random check of six other bills vetoed by Schwarzenegger last year, The Bee found that the visual appearance was exactly the same between the governor's document and the legislative Web site on four of the bills, but different on the other two.